Son of the Poxeclipse
by EvilReceptionistOfDoom
Summary: A lonely Wasteland tramper looking for answers will find destiny in the fortress of a woman warlord, if only he can stop running from the past. - Same world as the films, but different characters.
1. East to the Future

A man walks alone down the shoulder of a cracked, dusty road. He is bent with weariness, his face hidden beneath the brim of a battered slouch hat, a scarf wrapped over his mouth and nose to keep out the dust and a pair of shaded goggles over his eyes. Right now the dust isn't too bad, though. The storm is mostly over. He wears a long coat - the kind that was called a duster a century ago, a thought that makes his mouth twitch into something brief and faint and smile-like under the scarf. The coat is missing most of its buttons and flutters in the wind. Under it he wears heavy canvas trousers - work pants with many patches - and a long-sleeved turtleneck with a vest over it. Gloves - three of the fingers missing, the palms patched with metal plating. And boots: high, thick, thick-soled leather boots scuffed a dull dusty brown, the same color as the drifting sands. They are held shut with many wide buckles and with laces under those. At his hip, in various holsters or tied to one of two belts: a large steel wrench, a screwdriver, a serrated hunting knife, heavy-duty cutters, and a silver revolver. Across his back: a rusted Kalashnikov rifle, a radio with an antenna twice its length, something in a makeshift scabbard that might well be a sword. But despite this arsenal, the lonely traveller along this empty Wasteland road seems vulnerable, exposed to the elements and - approaching in a cloud of dust from the east - to humans who are not exposed. Without a vehicle, he is as if naked. The enemy is coming for him.

He both sees and hears their approach, the rev of the diesel and the hazed sun flashing off the windshield. A Ranchero with a gun mounted in the back and a cowcatcher on the front. For a moment he almost can convince himself they'll pass him by, but then the car brakes in a volcano of dust and stops with the back left wheel six inches from his toes. He stops walking.

"Hey, hey!" one of the riders crows. He wears football shoulderpads, a spiked codpiece, and a headdress of human scalps. "Where ya trampin', oldboy?"

"East," says the man.

A chorus of cackles rises from the automobile. A couple of men get out, and the scalp-wearer hops down from the back, leaving another to guard the gun. He has tall boots and a tail of more scalps on, but nothing else. The three surround the walker, chirping and hooting. Probably high off something, he hopes. He wants to give them an excuse for this.

"What's east, Wastelander?" The car's driver: gruff, his face stubbled and misshapen, his head hacked and scarred and his chin tattooed.

"Dunno. That's why I'm trampin' there."

"Cheeky," the driver spits. He advances on the stranger, but the man in the dust doesn't flinch.

"Take off ya hat," sneers the scalp-wearer. He bats it off in a quick slap, and the stranger catches it midair and replaces it. His hair is short, unkempt, uneven - but brown, a good clear brown, not dusty or greyed, and the scalp-wearer pops the catch on his scalper holster. "Cheeky!" he hisses, echoing the leader as he leans in.

"Wait!" the driver snaps. "Future says bring 'em in kickin'. No scalps." He motions the third, who came out the backseat, who moves for the stranger. His arms are massive, popping with veins and sinews, and his body tall, but his face is hidden beneath a half-mask, and the bits of covered half peeking out of the grille over his mouth and right eye are scarred with radiation and disease. He wears nothing but a black leather thong, and cuffs and boots made of old tire rubber. The stranger puts up a hand.

"I'll come peaceful, but none lays a hand on my kit, fair?" he says coolly.

The driver's eyes narrow. "So long's ya keep ya paws up, you can trust it, tramper. One move, barter's off. Fair."

The stranger nods. He gets into the car's backseat, the big one climbing in behind him, and the scalper growls and springs back up to the gunbed while the driver gets back behind the wheel. He turns around east and drives. They have gone but a mile or so when the road plunges. They go through a barricade, beneath the wary eyes of sentries. This is why the man didn't see the city the car came from: it lies in a steep-walled defile, so steep the road ends at a pulley rig where the driver exchanges words with another guard and they drive onto a rickety wooden platform to be lowered to their destination. And the advantage is clear. Not only is the place hidden and protected by its natural walls, but as they descend, silent, the man sees little tough grasses spotted along the canyon walls. So there are plants here, too. And where plants, there water. Where water, humans.

At the bottom there is a gun crew waiting, a gun that was trained on them the whole way down. Another exchange with another guard. The car revs and speeds away down the canyon. A few gutchurning turns and the city gate is before them. The doors open. The car crawls inside, parks in a motorpool of gunrigs, and everyone gets out. They push the stranger out with them. Scalper follows at a near distance, rubbing his knife.

The man does not ask where they are going. They enter a fortress welded together out of scrap metal. He sees the spiked autobodyparts of the Buzzards, the skull-encrusted decal of the Warboys, the horns and bones of the Rock Riders, the ribbed metal and wild paint of the Mutilators, the pounded chains of the Rollcage tribe, and many sorts he doesn't recognize. They have built this place from the smashed vehicles of those that tried to assail them - or maybe just didn't see the canyon. For all he knows, these people drove their opponents over the edge on purpose.

Inside, some ways above the ground level, the driver bows and salutes to a guard in a white shroud. A woman, the man realises, though her face is almost hidden. In his experience, female warlords are more reasonable than their male counterparts, if not always benevolent. Then again, the woman's headdress is a human head impaled on a spiked helmet, so he can't really assume.

"Whatcha brung the Future, driver?" the woman growls. "Meat? Slaves? Bodyparts?"

"Any or all, gatewoman. Tramper from the road. Came peaceful on account we left his kit."

The woman nods. "Tramper. Keep ya paws up and go before the Future." She turns a lever and a door opens. He goes through, hands up and visible as requested, and the door thunks shut behind him. It is very dark for a moment, especially after an age of desert sun; then a door retracts before him and he walks forward again before it, too, thuds shut.

"Desert nomad," sniffs another gatewoman, a tall thing with short, very pale hair, pale yellow eyes, sharp white teeth with the missing ones replaced by sharpened shell casings. "Who cares he came peaceful? Good meat. Organs for the parts man. Slave if he's pretty, replace one of the half-lifed ones-"

"Silent, Inevita. He's not your choice," says another woman. This one is clearly the leader. There is something about her that draws the eye instantly, that chills the blood, that arrests the heart. She wears a cloak of rusted maille, a collar of black feathers, a tank top made from an old canvas bag, with real buttons that gleam under the steel-stitched car-windows of the skylight roof. She has black hair that shines, freckles and pale skin that makes him wonder how she has avoided the sun-damage worn by every other human of the Wasteland. There is something genteel about her that he has not encountered in all the years of his travels. He puts a word to it: civilization. More: culture. And there is a danger, too, an undercurrent of danger that he cannot ignore. These things are present even in the way she talks. She beckons him forward. "Come up, tramper. Take off that dustgear and show us your face."

Almost unwillingly, the stranger approaches. He takes off the hat, then the scarf, then pushes the goggles up on his brow. Inevita, the woman with the yellow eyes, is surprised: he is young, a mere pup, and without the blemishes of the halflife. But he carries himself like an old man, weary with the decline of the world he knew when it was green. His eyes are that same green, the green of growing things, of life without the poison. The woman with the freckles, who is reclined upon a sofa in the midst of the room, smiles and rises.

"He's the one," she says softly. "Inevita. Get the other girls."

Suddenly the man thinks it might have been better to fight off the scalper and his cohorts in the desert. He generally keeps his face hidden as a rule, since, in this world, beauty isn't an asset, and he doesn't like being the target of sexual violence - not to mention youth attracts slavers, and health, beauty not being a factor. There are too many animals in the Wasteland. He can't help wondering if he's standing in a den of them right now.

"You wonder who I am, tramper," the woman says.

"The question had occurred to me, yes."

"I am the Future," she says with a bright smile: no teeth missing. "Who are _you_ , raggedyman?"

"I'm not anyone. Just a desert nomad."

"Without a rig?"

He sniffs. "Oh, I've got a rig. Just no guzzlelene. Had to ditch it and go afoot."

"You got a radio."

"Yup."

"You got a name, desert nomad?"

He takes a slow breath. "I don't like to give out my name."

"I got a feeling about you, tramper," says the woman softly. "A feeling like you could be the future too. You get my meaning?"

"No, ma'am, and I'd like to be off on my way."

She laughs. "No, sorry. But don't fret on your precious kit. None'll gank it. I got real safekeeping for it while you wait."

Before he can get the sword drawn something hits him - something that goes through his coat and vest and two shirts and stabs him in the small of the back. Suddenly he goes rigid and falls to the floor, shuddering and jerking, his mind afire with confusion and pain. His head is swimming and his body paralysed as Inevita and many other women appear and strip him of his gear, his coat, his boots more precious than oil. He gasps for breath but can barely seem to get enough to keep alive. The Future stands over him, smiling, as one of the women locks his wrists in a duomanacle. They blindfold him, and he hears her voice: "A little treasure of the oldworld. Lightning in a bottle. Don't fear, tramper - we're just keeping you guest. Your kit's just hid, and you'll get it back when the wait's done. If you come out kickin', that is. Otherways you'll come out dead, and then you won't care on your kit, so either way it's not to fret on. Enjoy your stay!"

The women drag him away, still twitching from the oldworld weapon - electricity, a thing he knows of but has rarely witnessed. He is held up against a wall and the manacle is hooked onto something so that he is mostly hanging; there is wide metal grating beneath his toes, but the grate spacing is broad. The edges of the grate bruise when he tries to put weight on his feet, once the weapon wears off - and it is a long time before then. He struggles a little, trying to get free, only to realise it's impossible. No use in calling for help, either - no attention is good attention in a place like this. Not much more to do than, as the Future said, wait. He can only hope it won't be too long.

It is long, however. Weeks long. Long enough that he begins to question reality, even to hallucinate. Once in a while he hears sounds and then he listens with the ravenous focus with which a starving man consumes food: people walking below, chatting on the rigs or a raid. They left his gloves on, and these insulate somewhat from the manacle digging into his wrists, but he bruises from the constant pressure, and his feet get blistered, then raw from the grating. He tries to rub off the blindfold, several times, but it will not be loosened or slipped. He can only see, through the dark material, a small difference in light between night and day. He only knows he's hallucinating, when it happens, because the voices he hears, quite close by, are those of his wife and sisters, now long gone - but the voices make him start. He wonders, as he hears them more and more often, if perhaps the Future has granted him something impossible, the ability to rewind. He is travelling back in time, hanging here, and one day the door he heard the women lock after they hung him will open and his wife will undo the chains and smooth back the blindfold and be there before him, smiling at him, and they will embrace and tenderly kiss, and all around will be green and wholesome and lush, back in their little valley by the Boolarong River. No fire will scorch the air this time, no poison turn their orchard to sand, no raiders come to steal his sisters, torch his home and leave him for dead. This time, things will be different.

The door does open. By then the tramper is semiconscious, mumbling dreamwords to someone invisible. They unhook his hands and drag him back to the Future's office, under the dimmed filtered light through the glass roof. There was a large duststorm earlier which lasted a week, and no one's been up to sweep the windows yet. When Nell, one of the gatewomen, unlocks the manacle, the tramper reaches for her as for a lover, and calls her by another's name. She recoils. He pulls off the blindfold himself and blinks, lost and dazzled by the light after months of forced darkness. Bewilderment sweeps over his face. The women in their shrouds and bones and armor stand back, watching him with a look very different than Inevita's when he first came into this room. It's as though they fear him now. He looks to the Future.

"Two months," she says.

"What?"

"Two months in the cage, without food or water. You are of the future, tramper. No one yet has done more than two days without hollering for relief, and no one more than a week without dying. You did it two months, and here you are kickin' and whole. You are the one I sought. Girls, get him his precious kit."

He struggles to his feet, staring at the woman who calls herself the Future. "How did you know?" he says at last.

"You were born after the oldworld poxeclipse, weren't you?"

"How could you know that?"

"Didn't know. I guessed. You had a radio. You got an old look in your young green eyes. I guessed it."

He hesitates before he asks the next question, but he cannot stop it. "And you? Are you like me?"

She smiles broadly and nods, just once. As the women return, piling the stranger's confiscated things in the center of the room, the Future says, "We're the new kind, born of the poison. We're the mutant good-to-come. I knew I couldn't be alone like this. And there'll be others, too - whole ones, pure ones who need not struggle and vie for the things the weak kind need for survival. We're the strong new kind, meant to remake the world when the last of the green's gone and the last of the water's poisoned and halflifed. I and you, tramper - we're the future."

A flash of memory moves through his mind, a thing his wife said. _You'll survive._ Wasting away from the halflife, bleeding in the yard she said it. Dying in his arms. _I'm not important, but you'll survive, you'll come out of this still strong, still ready to make and heal and fix. The world made you for itself, for the healing-time to come. For the future_. He shudders.

"I'll gather up my kit and go now, if it's fair by you," he says.

The Future is still a moment. Her eyes go strange and sad, but she nods once. "All right," she says, "you can head on for now, tramper. But don't ever forget what you've been made for."

He puts his things back on in silence - his boots, his dustgear, his stupid worthless radio. He is shaking. As he moves for the doorlock, he pauses just before it and says, without turning, "Future."

"Yes, tramperman?"

"Silver. My name's Silver."

"I'll remember it."

Then he's gone, and the Future stands on the balcony and watches him leave her city. And wonders when - if - she'll ever see him again. If he'll come back here when the rest all die, to make the world anew - to grow things in the poison and thrive. She prays she won't regret letting him walk away like this, but something in her promises her that he'll be back. She doesn't know when or how, but he will be.


	2. Woolongon

He reaches the city a little over two months later. It's the hottest part of the year; he walks by night to avoid being seen by any other travellers, as well as to avoid the heat of day, The strategy is effective, for though he has to cross Berserker territory to get to Woolongon, he manages to make the trip without incident. An old MFP rig passes him one night, but the driver either doesn't see him or doesn't care to stop. Otherwise, he sees no one, though he hears motorbikes occasionally while he tries to sleep out the days under hunks of wreckage or a tan-colored tarp he carries for this kind of thing. It's how he'd prefer it.  
Woolongon is one of the largest settlements he knows, and certainly the most permanent. It's a bit like Bartertown: a place where there's some semblance of law and order, where trade can happen and information spread without the place devolving into a bloodbath. But this is no Wasteland colony, scraped out of the sand and cobbled together with rusting junk. There are real buildings here, houses and things with brick walls, windows, roofs. The place got well-irradiated during the poxeclipse, but many survivors congregated where the structures were still intact after the bombs were over. There's no centralised government, and different gangs control different sections of the city, maintaining an uneasy peace that flares into violence now and again. There's none of the shinyclean look of the long-long-ago, just a weathered, rutted, rundown, hardscrabble village; but after the Wasteland, it feels like a strange Eden. It actually rains here, occasionally, on account of the seacoast being so near - that alone's miraculous enough. There are patches of scraggly vegetation there and again that remind the man piercingly of his old home before the end. Their little farm was never shinyclean, but- Damn that Future woman and her big talk, he thinks. His surname like a curse: Silver. He doesn't want to think of himself as that man anymore. Bitterness washes over him. If he could but remain nameless, nothing but a lonely tramper crossing back and forth over the continent in search of- What? What is he looking for? Just wandering aimlessly? Just living because he seems unable to die without working at it?  
It's his sisters. He still holds out hope they might be alive. Has to cling to something - it's all he's got left.  
That's why he's come back to Woolongon. That's why he wanders. Would've been smarter to stay put, otherwise. In some ways, the open Wasteland is safer than the settlements. There, he can avoid people. Here, that's not an option, and people, more often than not, mean danger. As he passes the near-illegible roadsign outside the town - modified to read We long gone, with a crude scrawl of a mushroom cloud - a waifish thing comes scampering up to him, eyes bright and greedy. And this just before dawn.  
"Stranger," she lilts, "hey, ya wanna have a naughty? I kin hand ya the best ya ever known if-"  
"Not likely."  
"Aw, don't turn a girl off! Good price, cheap an' affordable. Real chro-"  
The man has no patience for her game. Besides, by now he's recognized her. He says, "Where's your mate?"  
The girl's mouth drops open. "Hey!" she proclaims, affronted. "I ain't done ya before, have I?"  
"You pulled the same game when I come into town year before last, Margrit. He hid behind the wreck there?" He indicates the rust-rotted hulk of a city bus just under the sign. The girl scowls. The man sniffs. "Don't tell you've forgot me."  
"Ya near broke Clumps's noggin off," she growls.  
"So indeed. So again if he's in for a brawl."  
"Nobody likes a bully, dero." She trots back into the shadows, but he knows she's following him as he walks. No doubt wants to see where he beds down, then get her accomplice, Clumps, and ambush him asleep. This is why he dislikes people. He thinks, disinterestedly, of his previous visit here: first this Margrit tried to scam his kit off him, then one of the town gangs - smaller than a Wasteland tribe but maybe more vicious - came after him and he had to climb to lose them. It didn't leave him a good impression. The sooner he finds the Ologist, the sooner he can be off the streets. The sooner he can get to work. His mission here is dual: first, to ask after his sisters; second, to bring back something he can trade in the desert for guzzolene, so he can get his rig out of storage and stop walking all over the Wasteland like a deathwish. Neither task is very likely to be accomplished, but nevertheless, he will try. And in the meantime, the Ologist is something of a friend, if he can be said to have any friends. He would like to see her.  
As sun at last pours over the horizon, the heat switches from average to exceptional, as if a gas burner had been flipped. The girl, Margrit, stops trailing him and ducks for cover. The man's glad to be rid of her.  
The Ologist lives between the water and the old steelworks, on a peninsula with a few scabrous trees, in a salt-stained shipping container with holes cut for windows with a hacksaw. She has made the place shockingly homey, another thing that hurts the man's memory. When he was here last, she had put burlap curtains over the window-holes, salvaged dishes from God-knows-where, had a plant growing out of a busted bottle and a rug on the floor. Today, he sees that she's painted the exterior of the container with festive colors, blue and white and gold. From the tree nearest the house dangles a windchime made of glass fragments strung from wire scraps. Pretty - unsettlingly so. He stares at it a long moment.  
The Ologist is repairing a rig in the garage - another converted shipping container - which sits next to and behind her house. He waits til she emerges. Seeing him, her face lights up. "Well, if it ain't Chemical Silver, all in the flesh! My God but it feels a regular eternity since you last come. Any luck with your girls?" He shakes his head, smarting at her use of his name, and she looks sad. She wipes her hands on a rag tucked into her belt. Her glasses are a pair of mismatched, cracked lenses held together with leather and screws. A large part of her jaw is missing, and the lower half of her left ear. He's never asked her how this happened, and she hasn't volunteered it. Nevertheless, the injury doesn't seem to have affected her quality of life.  
She motions him to the door. "Drive on in, mate. We'll have a chat."

"So," says the Ologist, sitting at the makeshift table: a slab of sheetrock set atop a bank of water-barrels. The man stands by a window, where the plant in the bottle is still alive: a small sad green thing with a few leaves and a single creeper snaking out at the curtain.  
"No word of them, then?"  
"No." She turns a chipped mug in her hands, the decal long faded. He seems worse than last time, she thinks, more wounded, more silent. But how can she ask about it without him closing her off, like he always does? The last time she called him by his first name, he went madder than a caught snake and bugged out, not to return for two days and then with a gunshot wound in his arm. She, unlike few still living, knew his wife, and his missing sisters, and him before he became this brooding, nameless raggedyman. Though her own hair is greying and her face getting lined, the Ologist is actually a few years younger than him. Like his wife, she can see in him a new breed, a new step in human evolution that will help mankind survive the poxeclipse's brutal aftermath. When the last plant has died, when there is no food left to eat and no water left to drink not halflifed or poisoned, Silver and those like him - and there must be others like him - will persist. But for now, he struggles to cope with the world as it is, and she can't sit by and watch his spirit silently writhe. So she asks, as an overture, "You been gone a long spell. Anything happen in the Wasteland?"  
He takes a reluctant breath. "Got kidnapped. Two months til they let me free. Could've turned ugly."  
So that's it. She wonders what the kidnappers did to him. She thinks he's crazy to wander the interior like he does: the Wasteland's nothing but a deathtrap. At least in Woolongon she can trade repair work for goods and safety. In the Wasteland, the only rule is the gun, the only reason survival - if there's a reason given at all.  
"I'm ace, Leese," he says wearily, seeing the worry cross her brow. "Just some warlord off her axle, thought I was some kind of godsend or- Hell, I can't ken a crackers bird like that. But I swear by you I'm unhurt."  
"All right," she concedes. She wants to continue into a tirade about his putting himself in harm's way, but catches and holds it back. "We'll go out asking after your sisters once you're settled in. I'll go tight up the shop." She pushes back from the table; the door thunks shut behind her.


End file.
